“And why not stay at home here?” said Tom, doggedly.
“To blurt out your secret in some drunken moment, and be hanged at last!” said Linton, with a cutting irony.
“An', maybe, tell how one Misther Linton put the wickedness first in my head,” added Tom, as if finishing the sentence.
Linton bit his lip, and turned angrily away to conceal the mortification the speech had caused him. “My good friend,” said he, in a deliberate voice, “you think that whenever you upset the boat you will drown me; and I have half a mind to dare you to it, just to show you the shortness of your calculation. Trust me”—there was a terrible distinctness in his utterance of these words—“trust me, that in all my dealings with the world, I have left very little at the discretion of what are called men of honor. I leave nothing, absolutely nothing, in the power of such as you.”
At last did Linton strike the right chord of the fellow's nature; and in his subdued and crestfallen countenance might be read the signs of his prostration.
“Hear me now attentively, Keane, and let my words rest well in your memory. The trial comes on on the 15th; your evidence will be the most important of all; but give it with the reluctance of a man who shrinks from bringing his landlord to the scaffold. You understand me? Let everything you say show the desire to screen Mr. Cashel. Another point: affect not to know anything save what you actually saw. You never can repeat too often the words, 'I did n't see it.' This scrupulous reliance on eyesight imposes well upon a jury. These are the only cautions I have to give you. Your own natural intelligence will supply the rest. When all is finished you will come up to Dublin, and call at a certain address which will be given you hereafter. And now we part. It is your own fault if you lose a friend who never deserted the man that stood by him.”
“An' are you going back to Dublin now, sir?” asked Keane, over whose mind Linton's influence had become dominant, and who actually dreaded to be left alone, and without his guidance.
Linton nodded an assent.
“But you 'll be down here at the trial, sir?” asked Tom, eagerly.
“I suspect not,” said Linton. “If not summoned as a witness, I'll assuredly not come.”